Doubts About Mushrooms

[Gertsh]

Just briefly about my background: 27 y/o male. Have been meditating for 2 years now and been to two Vipassana retreats. I have seen great benefits from my meditation, mostly peace of mind, concentration abilities and more clarity about and connection to my emotions. I really like working with what’s going on inside of me. I had trips before with 1 g and 2 g of dried mushrooms. Especially the 2 g trip was beautiful. I felt a deep connection, a feeling of love to everything around me and the elevated consciousness allowed me to reevaluate my relationships and see them from a more loving, detached perspective.

A week ago, I ingested 3 g of dried cubensis mushrooms from the same batch. The effects were kicking in quite rapidly and after half an hour I was experiencing strong visuals already. Not very long after that, I got completely disoriented. I couldn’t remember anymore how I got into this state and what was happening to me. I was desperately trying to find out who I was but having a single clear thought was hopeless. My mind felt like a chaotic battlefield. There was nothing to hang on to. I would find myself in one place not knowing why or how I got there only to find myself in another place shortly after. With a last sense of clarity I took a cold shower and chugged a bottle of juice. Once the effects became weaker, my orientation came back and I felt better. I even enjoyed the trip again. It didn’t even feel like a bad trip, since I didn’t feel very fearful, just anxious to find out what had happened. Now, almost a week later, I don’t feel any negative psychological after-effects. I did have a slight headache for two days though.

Reflecting back on it now, I don’t see the benefit of such a mushroom experience. I had wanted to try a higher dose to have a spiritual breakthrough experience, but it really was only confusion and madness. The 2 g trip felt much more spiritual. Yes, with less ego it might be possible to relax into the experience, but I felt like there was just no room for me to let go because I couldn’t have a single clear thought. My awareness was wildly moving without any control from my side.

 I value clarity and peace of mind and this was giving me the opposite. From my current perspective, it looks like meditation and having good conceptual frameworks helps me much more than working with mushrooms. Still, I am very open and curious to hear comments about this from people with more experience!

[Nahm]

@Gertsh I have experienced shrooms with a fair number of people. Just from my experience, I think either those shrooms had some imperfection going on, or, you are holding on too much to "reality". I've seen a couple people have bad trips and I think it was because they didn't have the proper foundation in place before the trip. This is highly subjective but my "proper foundation" is 99% vegan eating, daily meditation, daily excercise, and creative activities as often as possible. Writing, song writing, playing with my kids, painting with them, dancing, etc. Anything creative and non-adult-serious. Oh ya, and always 'letting that shit go'. 

On the shroom note, and I'm not trying to sell a concept or anything, but, man..you're 3g's in and my exit from "reality" started at 5g and 'completed' at 8g's. Again, not trying to pitch the idea, just from utter compassion, you're so close to what for me, was the only total game changing experience of my "life". 

On the more practical side, I have experienced many very specific diets through out my life and I find clarity and peace of mind are (roughly) 99% food related and 1% whatever else. In the sense that, when I ate bread, sugar, meat, pasta, etc - I couldn't even see any sense to someone telling me about reality. I was "good". Nowadays I wake up with clarity and joy to the tun that I just start laughing, or joy crying.  I mean, when I stop and look at it, my body & brain and thoughts are made out of food. If I pissed in my gas tank my truck is not going to have much clarity. It could also be a reserved psychological issue or trauma, but still, there's no clarity to let that shit go if one is eating the stuff many companies claim is "food". 

*Disclaimer: this is sensitive person shit. I'm crazy. Don't give me credibility. Don't believe me. I don't mean any offense, Experience it. 

[hundreth]

1 hour ago, Gertsh said:

I value clarity and peace of mind and this was giving me the opposite. 

There's your answer.

[Richard Alpert]

1 hour ago, Nahm said:

@Gertsh I have experienced shrooms with a fair number of people. Just from my experience, I think either those shrooms had some imperfection going on, or, you are holding on too much to "reality". I've seen a couple people have bad trips and I think it was because they didn't have the proper foundation in place before the trip. This is highly subjective but my "proper foundation" is 99% vegan eating, daily meditation, daily excercise, and creative activities as often as possible. Writing, song writing, playing with my kids, painting with them, dancing, etc. Anything creative and non-adult-serious. Oh ya, and always 'letting that shit go'. 

On the shroom note, and I'm not trying to sell a concept or anything, but, man..you're 3g's in and my exit from "reality" started at 5g and 'completed' at 8g's. Again, not trying to pitch the idea, just from utter compassion, you're so close to what for me, was the only total game changing experience of my "life". 

On the more practical side, I have experienced many very specific diets through out my life and I find clarity and peace of mind are (roughly) 99% food related and 1% whatever else. In the sense that, when I ate bread, sugar, meat, pasta, etc - I couldn't even see any sense to someone telling me about reality. I was "good". Nowadays I wake up with clarity and joy to the tun that I just start laughing, or joy crying.  I mean, when I stop and look at it, my body & brain and thoughts are made out of food. If I pissed in my gas tank my truck is not going to have much clarity. It could also be a reserved psychological issue or trauma, but still, there's no clarity to let that shit go if one is eating the stuff many companies claim is "food". 

*Disclaimer: this is sensitive person shit. I'm crazy. Don't give me credibility. Don't believe me. I don't mean any offense, Experience it. 

yep, food is pure chemistry.

[Leo Gura]

7 hours ago, Gertsh said:

Reflecting back on it now, I don’t see the benefit of such a mushroom experience. I had wanted to try a higher dose to have a spiritual breakthrough experience, but it really was only confusion and madness.

Lol

That WAS the spiritual breakthrough experience!!!

You just didn't surrender to it because you are still under the impression that you exist.

YOU DO NOT EXIST!!!

The mushrooms were trying to show you that, but you didn't want to hear it. You chose to cling to physical reality instead.

"A clear single thought"?

Spirituality is no-mind, no-thought. You cannot think about the Absolute. If you could, you wouldn't need the psychedelic in the first place. The point of the psychedelic is to open you up to a new way of accessing reality: direct consciousness. Direct consciousness involves no thinking. It's an infinite multi-parallel process.

The solution is to drop all your expectations about spirituality and reality. Everything you believe is a lie.

Trip more and REALLY surrender. That's the answer. Remember that Truth is an acquired taste. You ain't gonna like it at first. It's not easy to admit that what you call "sanity" is actually insanity, and what you call "insanity" is actually sanity.

[Gertsh]

Thanks for the replies. Helps me wrap my head around what happened.

I guess one of my main challenges in this work is that on the one hand I am constantly building up my conceptual frameworks, thinking about stuff, trying to understand spirituality, enlightenment etc. and on the other hand I try letting go of beliefs. Not easy. And I have studied Pyrrhonism...

But apparently in the end it's really just about having the guts to surrender. During the trip it felt like there was just no room, no access whatsoever to letting go, but I feel like I have to look more closely at that.

[Leo Gura]

@Gertsh Letting go is as simple as: I let go.

 

[Joseph Maynor]

11 hours ago, Gertsh said:

Thanks for the replies. Helps me wrap my head around what happened.

I guess one of my main challenges in this work is that on the one hand I am constantly building up my conceptual frameworks, thinking about stuff, trying to understand spirituality, enlightenment etc. and on the other hand I try letting go of beliefs. Not easy. And I have studied Pyrrhonism...

But apparently in the end it's really just about having the guts to surrender. During the trip it felt like there was just no room, no access whatsoever to letting go, but I feel like I have to look more closely at that.

Why does it have to be an either or?  Do you appreciate that this stipulation is a duality?  Enlightenment requires theory, practice, being, all of this.  Once you learn how to cling better and the irrelevance of belief to Being, you can cling much more dynamically instead of these big, broad, binary, context-independent approaches to clinging.  That is a stipulation of the Mind-Matrix too.  Enlightenment requires it all, and you will see at the end that there is a specific thing that you want to get (<=listen to how dualistic this sounds!).  Then Enlightenment gives you the tools to cause that "experience" (<=look at the duality here lol) more or less at will.  The Mind-Matrix tricks you into thinking beliefs and need to believe are really important -- but listen to this: Beliefs are irrelevant to Being.  Totally, 100% irrelevant to Being.  If you are clinging too hard to beliefs, by definition you will never "know" Being.  Being requires an arms-lengthing of the Mind-Matrix combined with a deep understanding of the nature and limits of duality.

But see, even this is said using language which is dualistic.  So, don't cling too hard to this.  Enlightenment is hard to "teach".  Enlightenment is *loosely challenging* (<=no word is appropriate here because it is too dualistic) the medium in which teaching happens: duality.  Clinging to beliefs is important to Being, it depends on the situation, but it will happen intuitively and naturally pursuant to context.  But, the "Being that is de-void for the most part of Monkey-Mind" has little to do with beliefs.  Beliefs, once conceived as such, are an object of the Mind-Matrix, not an object of Being.  There are no objects in Being.  All objects are Mind-Matrix elements.

Tip -- Let go, but don't turn letting go into more ideology, dogma, or beliefs.  Enlightenment is about loosening our grip on beliefs and becoming smarter about how and when to cling to beliefs.  And knowing the limits and traps of *need to believe*.  You don't need beliefs as much as the Mind-Matrix deceives you that you do.  Being has nothing to do with beliefs.  This isn't 100% true, but it's a good affirmation to say to install this into your subconscious-mind.  

I almost hesitate to write anything at all because of the duality of language.  Ultimately, theories, combined with your own self-inquiry, will cause shifts for you, and those shifts will cause your enlightenment, not mere beliefs alone.  Enlightenment is not conceptual.  Even this is too mechanical.  There is a conceptual component to Enlightenment too.  See?  Nothing I say is as certain as the Mind-Matrix wants to make it seem when it is communicated.  The finite cannot capture the infinite.  But even this claim is finite.  There's a rigidity, a mechanicalness, that is built into duality.  It's like trying to design a human being using strong AI -- it's never gonna work!  Engineering is too dualistic to create a human being.  

Edited September 2, 2017 by Joseph Maynor